Cheap Coffee
by Garmonbozia
Summary: It's funny how things work out. A single bullet can cost you millions, a single word can cost you your life. And yet here we are today, and Jim's about to get the limelight back, about to get the best help he could ask for, and all for the price of one thin, awful coffee. - - Post-S3 oneshot, and matches the rest of my post-S3 oneshots. Building up toward something bigger.


Poor Phil. He's not got much to do with himself these days. No job, no life… And no point in his little Empty Hearse endeavour anymore. Poor Phil, poor lamb. You know I feel so very sorry for him. Phil deserves a break, doesn't he? For all of his loyalty. For all of his hard work during our long absence, Phil deserves a little something back.

_Our_, by the way. Pay attention to that. Because there are those who would tell you I'm a megalomaniac and an egotist, and they will tell you that's the Royal Our. I don't like to think I'm so far gone as all that. Really, if I thought I was some sort of untouchable god, would I condescend to come down here and waste time with a lowly streak of pond life like Phil? And yet here I am. No, that's a totally normal 'our'. I start to feel a little bit forgotten sometimes. Yes, Holmes was dead for two years. Yes he's back. Yes he's to be feted and cheered on and feared just enough to flatter him. But come on – all those bloody TV screens, all those radio frequencies, all that internet space, my big hijacking. And it's _still_ as though no one can even believe that I'm real anymore.

I am, y'know. I am real. I'm very real, real all over, flesh and blood and bone and brain, I am as real as they come.

Phil never doubted that. That's why Phil is getting his prize now.

Phil is drowsing, propped up against his fist, in an outdoor café full of tourists. Probably easier for him to waste time in a place like this. Nobody will notice him nursing that one coffee for a couple of hours. Jesus, is this what unemployed people do? My first instinct was, in fact, to offer him a job. But Phil's not going to take a job from me. Or, if he did, it would be with some ridiculous notion to betray me later on. As if he could.

So it's time to be a little bit cleverer than that.

I approach his table, dragging a spare chair with me as I go, and sit down while this lonely, miserable little man thinks he dreamt me, realizes he didn't, wakes up panicking. He shuffles back, almost overturning the chair beneath him, reaching for his phone and running away all at once. I say, quite as simply as I can, "Stop." And yes. Everything stops. "Sit." He steadies his chair and himself. Sitting back from the table, as far from me as he thinks he'll get away with. Bless him. "It's not worth your while to try taking off again."

His eyes, like all the other eyes, flutter momentarily down to his shirtfront .

Like all the other times I've had to watch this, mine shut, and it takes a very deep breath to quiet my soul again. "Can the former forensic analyst please have a little think about that, and tell me what he did wrong?"

"…Daytime. Laser wouldn't necessarily show in bright sun."

Yeah… Yeah, okay, we'll let him off with that one. It's technically true, even if it doesn't apply in this case. I would also have accepted the answers, 'Your sniper is too good to need a bloody laser guide and honestly he considers it cheating and only uses them to make a threatening statement against someone we don't intend to really shoot', and, which is the truth of the matter, 'I just ought to know better than to try and run away from you.'

I was _going_ to bring Moran. But by the time I would have mobilized him and he polished up his favourite rifle… Not worth the bother.

Anyway, to business.

"Alright," I begin over. "Well, now that you're all calmed down, and I don't think there's any need for introductions, is there?-" A slow, bovine shake of the head. His eyes, at all times, are centred, glued to me, wide and terrified. That's nice. Nice to feel that again. "-Well, maybe now we can have a bit of a chat, you and I."

Phil clears his throat and tries to summon some vestige of courage to ask, "Give me one good reason to listen to you."

"Because you'll like it. Just to warn you, it'll start out sounding threatening. Then you'll gradually come to realize it's not you I'm threatening. This will be a lot less stressful for you if you try to bear that in mind."

Do you see this? Do you see how nice I'm being? Those of you who are familiar with me will know, this isn't something I do all the time. It's not something I take lightly.

But I'm being nice to Phil.

The hard and cynical people out there will say it's because I need him for something. But if that were the case I would have just brought Moran and left him no choice.

I'm being nice to Phil because he's been nice to me. Without ever even knowing, Phil kept the memory of me alive, kept the idea fresh and scary all this time. My long-nosed cryogenic blessing, I'm being nice to him for… for services rendered.

Here's something you might not know about Phillip Anderson. Naturally, after the mock-joint suicides, John Watson wasn't doing an awful lot of blogging. He'd rather run out of things to say. Sad, isn't it, when a man becomes so dependent on another man that he doesn't even have his own life to record. Wonder what that's like… Not that I've ever recorded, or been recorded. Moran doesn't have the – there's no polite way to put this – the mental equipment. There are others, but nobody with the interest.

Until Phil.

Phil got so convinced of it all. Sherlock was innocent. I was real. He got so convinced that, even without evidence of any sort whatsoever, he made it a part of his mission. I was his little side project. From the moment he caught on that my body wasn't found on that rooftop, Phil got right into it. Started up a little blog of his own. Putatively it was about Sherlock still being alive. But that was _my_ world he'd escaped into. Those were my people he was tearing open. Phil was guessing which stories were real and which were bollocks, but even if he only got forty percent of them right, they were still about me. All of those stories were about me.

"You were at my funeral," I begin. "Thanks for that. Must've made the place look a bit fuller."

"Not really. Me standing at the back and one other mourner. Oh, and the police. The police filled the place a bit."

Ah. Well, that's just what I wanted to chat about. I reach into my jacket and bring out my phone. Keep an eye to make sure he doesn't try to do the same. The funeral was one of his earliest entries. I've got it cued up so that I can read from it.

First I give a little cough, straighten my spine. It's been a while since I did any dramatics, at least in front of people. Wouldn't do to show oneself up in front of a fan, now, would it?

"_As I watched my colleagues gather,_" he wrote all that time ago, "_I knew there would be nothing here for them. Moriarty was smarter than that_ – thank you, Phil, yes I am – _None of the names on their arrest warrants were going to appear. In the end, there was only one other person present. She had her identification checked at the crematorium door and was allowed to pass, and thereafter sobbed bitterly at the end of the front row…_ Seriously? Nobody else? I would've thought Kitty would've shown up."

"Reilly? No, nobody. Just that girl."

"You don't name her in the article. Just out of interest, what ID did she have with her that day?"

He thinks about whether or not to tell me. But she's mine. He knows that; we'll come to that in a minute, the question of who she belongs to. "Kali," he relents. "Kali Bann. Nobody could prove it was false."

There's a whole lot more. He met her when she went to pick up the ashes. There's all this bollocks about how she wore blue to the funeral because it was her only good dress, because she thought she ought to pretend to be someone good. There's a lot of crap. And then, in all of Phil's vast, slightly disturbing volumes of work, she is never mentioned again.

I mean, _c'mon_…

"She turned out to be quite the source for you, didn't she? Regular little font of information."

He shifts. Gets all nervous and fidgety. Reaches for his coffee so he can steady his shaky hands around it. "What do you mean? I never saw her again after that. She hid pretty well."

"It's good that you're lying. It means you know what side your bread's buttered on. But Mr Anderson, please don't make me test whether or not you know who to be afraid of. And this _Kali-_ I know her as Odd most often – she's not someone you need to be afraid of."

"This is the part that feels like a threat, isn't it?"

"Yes."

With a sigh, he begins to give it up. He makes sure to begin by reassuring me, the girl is insane. I know that. I sent her there. The only thing I might have said is it's no wonder the two of them get on so well, but I bite my tongue on that one. So he goes rattling on, all the things he knows. _Defending_ her too; 'she never told me anything substantial', 'she would only ever confirm or deny'. But I know all of this. I let him go on. I let him vent it. Seems to be a weight off his chest.

Besides, it's fun to watch the realization come.

It dawns on him slowly, almost elegantly. He's talking and talking, and never so much as pauses, but he begins to remember – _there was going to be a part that felt like a threat, and then there would be something after_…

He's talking and talking and mid-word everything crystallizes for him.

"…I could have told someone about her, but I knew the moment she opened her mouth they'd lose interest. That was smart of you, leaving somebody mad who knew the truth. She'll never be bel-wait. Wait, who are you threatening? If I'm not in any danger, who is?"

I tell him the coffee's on me, and slip a fiver under the edge of the cup.

You're welcome, Phil.


End file.
